Support Chris Engel in his Fight Against Cancer

I am reaching out to share that our dear, beloved friend Chris Engel is facing the challenge of a lifetime in hopes and confidence that you, his friends, his family will respond with generosity and prayers as he faces and endures this illness. As many of you know, Chris was diagnosed with esophageal cancer last year. After completing chemotherapy, he recently underwent surgery on January 21 and now faces a long journey toward recovery.

Let’s come together as a community to lift the financial burden from Chris’s shoulders, allowing him to focus entirely on his recovery. As he works toward healing, the overwhelming financial challenges make the support of his loved ones more important than ever.

Since the earliest days of the Ross School, Christopher Engel has served, counseled, and offered the students, parents, faculty, and the wider community opportunities, encouragement, and a living example of the Ross Core Values of Cooperation, Courage, Integrity, Gratitude, Mindfulness, Responsibility, Respect–and Compassion. For those of us blessed to have him intersect with and affect our lives we see one who consistently perseveres to travel the higher road with wit and wisdom.

An artist of renown whose paintings of Prophets and Alchemy, themselves portraits of his boundless Joy–are the gifts he has poured out to countless hearts and minds over the many years selflessly, passionately with creativity and untrammeled imagination.

Chris makes the impossible possible. As the Director of Ross School’s Community Programs, Chris made leaders of high school students, training them as counselors and imbuing in them the sense of purpose and service he models–how to reach down and take the hands of those younger than they and guide them safely through the numerous programs offered during the summers and throughout the year. He has influenced the teachers in this way, too, expecting integrity, patience, excellence, and devotion to raise students to a higher level than even they knew they could. Over the many years, Chris has also been the champion to countless students and their families who otherwise might not have been able to afford to attend camp or participate in the diverse offerings.

Chris opens doors. Each of us who have had him hold the door for us to move forward in our gifts knows that it was he who believed in us, who paved the way, ran interference when necessary to persuade others what he already knew, that we would succeed in our efforts and flourish in our calling at Ross and beyond.

His humor, his willingness to get down on his knees for the littlest, youngest members of our community, to clown, to sing and dance, to put on his pineapple costume as DJ Pineapple, to bring them to both grand palaces and humble dwellings is nothing less than magical. And with discernment point young and old to that shining star of hope and to be brave in the face of life’s painful challenges.

This is Chris’s painful challenge. There is no telling Chris’ story without his wife, Laura. Both Chris and Laura are as close as you get to angelic presences flowing fountains bending low into the streams of everyday bubbling up with the playful, compassionate living waters that inspire. Together since high school they are knit and bound together with the shared vision of service and love to all they meet starting with their family, Noah and Emma, Noah's dear fiancée Paris, and Chris’ parents Franklin and Miranda.

It was this past summer that Franklin became ill and while Chris and Laura were caring for him it was then that Chris learned he had esophageal cancer himself. They had to take time away from work to care for Franklin who passed in September just as Chris began his excruciatingly debilitating chemo treatments. He continued to come to campus until it was no longer possible given the effects and consequent compromised immune system. For this reason Laura was also advised to leave her work with Early Childhood to protect Chris from possible infections.

Chris had surgery on January 21 and is bracing for the long, long road to recovery including more chemo. Chris’ main concern is that while he is going through this he can’t help others. When he said this to me, I took him in with astonished respect, my heart swelling that it is always this for Chris –it was always about helping others.

Eight years ago, when my daughter had to have a kidney transplant and I had to take a leave of absence from Ross, Chris stood in the breach for me, for us, making what would have been impossible to afford, possible for my daughter and me to be together while she recovered.

I ask you to remember how he helped you, how he touched your lives, your children’s lives, how he made you more than you were before you met him, how he offered his time and talent to grow yours. Now it is our time to give. Chris and Laura do not ask for this but I ask, we as a community ask for your financial support to offer them at least relief from that enormous burden. I ask also for your prayers, your powerful positive intentions for both Chris and for Laura for the strength and continued courage that will carry them through and over, healed, whole, and vibrant in our midst.

With Heartfelt Gratitude,

Margaret Kestler